anarchism

By Brian S. Roper

Review of David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (Allen Lane, 2013)

Was the Occupy movement an anarchist movement? David Graeber certainly thinks so and dedicates much of The Democracy Project depicting it in these terms.

In reality the influence of Anarchism as a diverse political current was highly uneven across the hundreds of occupations that took place globally in September, October and November of 2011. The relative influence of anarchists, socialists, feminists, Indigenous activists, greens, social democrats, left nationalists, and others varied largely according to the relative strengths of these currents prior to the emergence of the Occupy movement, and how they conducted themselves during the course of the encampments.

Public outcry continues to grow across Canada over the widespread abuse of civil liberties during the recent G20 Summit in Toronto. Over 1,000 people were rounded-up and arrested between June 26th– 27th, resulting in the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. While the majority of those arrested have since been released, at least 16 people remain under strict bail conditions and face a variety of serious criminal charges. Countless others who managed to avoid arrest were indiscriminately searched, detained for hours, and even violently attacked by police.

In the early hours of May 18, a branch of the Royal Bank of Canada went up in flames. We know this because a previously unidentified group, calling itself FFFC – Ottawa, posted a video of the incident to indymedia.org, the radical web portal. RBC was the target for “stealing native land” during the 2010 Winter Olympics. FFFC promised to attend the upcoming G20 protests in Toronto.

A review of David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography (AK Press, 2009).

Vilified by the media, romanticized by scores of young people, viewed by some as the bane of the global justice movement – like it or not, the Black Bloc anarchists who first entered public consciousness at the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in 1999 came to symbolize the resistance to global inequality of the late 1990s and early 2000s in North America.